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Saturday, 25 January 2014

Devexpress vs Telerik vs Infragistics: Which one to choose and why?

Devexpress vs Telerik vs Infragistics: Which one to choose and why?

Devexpress, Telerik and Infragistics are the great third party tools for you for both your windows and web application. These third party tools mainly support .NET technologies like WinForms, Silverlight, ASP.NET and WPF. Devexpress also supports windows application built in Delphi programming language and I am currenty working on it. Also I have heard some other third party tools like ComponentOne, SyncFusion and Januscontrols but never worked upon them. Which one is good, which one to choose and why? Although this is difficult and time consuming task, but let's try to solve the confusion.

Which tool is best? This is very hard to say. This question seems philosophical to me. There's no one answer.

Devexpress, Telerik and Infragistics have their own strong and weak points. Each and every tool has some learning curve to understand its way of doing the things. These all tools provide excellent performance and great convenience to the user.

It is upto you and your needs to choose one of these. Following are some humble suggestions which you can consider before choosing one of these tools for your windows or web application.

1. What is your requirement?

What is the nature of your application and what functionalities do you want to put in? This should be the first questions striking in your mind before choosing any thrid party tool for your UI. Once you finalized your requirement, then move to these contorls and read their documentation, features list, online demos, try trial versions to implement your functionality. If the tool is giving you your desired functionality, consider it.

2. Your familiarity with tool

A good choice, nevertheless is to choose one you know. I would start by expressing my opinion that the best tool set is the one with which you gain your greatest familiarity. I think the market demonstrates that there is a sufficient percentage of buyers to support all these three tools. I would also conjecture that the longer you work in any one, the more you will like it.

My observation is that each library comes with its own set of presuppositions: about structure, nomenclature, interface and class design and inheritance; about consistency and your mental model of the controls and events; about many things.

Some of these presuppositions blend easily with the way some people think. Others blend better with other brain architecture. It doesn't mean one is better or worse. It means one is different than the other. You have to find the one that works for the way you think and program. Otherwise you will be twisting on a right-hand nut with a left-hand wrench.

3. Which tool your co-workers and other teams of your company are using?

You should also investigate with other teams in your company if they are using any of these tools. If yes, learn from their experience.

4. Support and Documentation

Evaluate each tool in terms of their support and documentation. Go with tool which provide solid support, documentation, sample examples, tutorials, example codes and demonstrations. All the component libraries should be well-represented and documented. When you will use a third party software or tool, you will need much help from those people. The tool vendor should have good forum.

5. Cross browser compliant

If you are looking for Devexpress, Telerik and Infragistics for you web application, must ensure that all the features which you need from these third party tools run same on all the browsers.

6. Cost and Licensing

Cost should be reasonable and licensing should be simple.

Conclusion

To be fair, all grid components will do great if you're on the standard track. As soon as you'll have something to implement that is not a general purpose usage it will get harder. This is true for all third party controls.

Compare demos and trial versions based on your needs. I would encourage you to evaluate the controls on your own to see which control will best meet your needs. That's the best suggestion I can suggest.